Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book by Rebecca Davies (review)

This study makes a bona fide contribution to our knowledge of pre– Golden Age children’s literature, even while saying less about didactic texts and their intended juvenile audience than about how women were empowered by writing them. Rebecca Davies engages the work of such scholars as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Greenfield, Susan Gubar, Michael McKeon, Felicity Nussbaum, Ruth Perry, and Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos to argue that in the eighteenth century, “women writing for and about the education of children employed the trope of maternity to effectively gain social and cultural status for themselves as women” (1). She also demonstrates that, ironically, this maternal trope was effective only when distanced from the physical signifiers of maternity as well as from patriarchal control. It was not giving birth but rather writing that produced these authors’ maternal authority.

Davies proceeds to argue this claim in more or less chronological order. She begins in chapter 1 with Samuel Richardson’s less than successful efforts to construct an authoritative mother in his sequel to Pamela. Richardson’s now married heroine must defer to her husband’s patriarchal control, not only in terms of her own physical body but also regarding theories of childrearing, all of which difficulties represent conflicting eighteenth-century attitudes toward maternity. Richardson’s ultimate solution is to have his exemplary heroine write an educational tract. “The ideal rational maternal educator in the eighteenth century,” Davies tells us, “was a written mother whose biological functions were, consequently, no longer relevant” (20).

The next four chapters explore maternal writing by four diverse educational writers—Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Martin Taylor. In chapter 2, Davies shows how Fielding is able to invest her fictional educator with greater authority than Pamela’s. In The Governess, or the Little Female Academy (1749), Fielding moves Mrs. Teachum out of the domestic sphere and into a girls’ academy. With her husband safely dead, Mrs. Teachum can make her own pedagogical decisions, often explicitly correcting her students’ thinking and behavior. Mrs. Teachum also writes, further distancing herself from both societal control and the lowly status of governess (44).

In contrast to the external controls on thinking and behavior that mark Fielding’s academy, Wollstonecraft’s educational aims outlined in chapter 3 are to teach daughters—via educated mothers—to regulate their own thinking and behavior as rational creatures rather than as sexually defined moral paragons. Wollstonecraft’s didactic texts are less revolutionary than one might suppose. Indeed, the restrictions occasioned by her own maternity and women’s reduced role in society inform her Maria, an unfinished novel about how maternal authority is finally unable to achieve any real political power. Chapter 4 concerns the work of Edgeworth, who further distanced maternal authority from physical maternity by making such education into a scientific study, infusing her work with the doubled authority of both mother and empiricist. Davies calls for more studies of the political and social aspects of Edgeworth’s writing for children, since it is impossible in this period to divorce writing for children from the larger revolutionary “war of ideas” (91).

By chapter 5, Davies is demonstrating how eighteenth-century gains in maternal authority play out in early nineteenth-century texts, particularly five key educational works by the dissenting author Taylor, whose maternal contributions are even more self-consciously literary than those of earlier writers. Taylor draws attention to both the material nature and the economic value of her literary product (109). She even finds a way to include childless women as maternal educators to younger members of dissenting congregations.

Davies concludes her study in chapter 6 by tracing a transmuted maternal trope in Jane Austen’s Emma and Northanger Abbey. According to Davies, these novels are informed by an implicit didacticism that absorbs “maternal educative authority into a ‘feminine’ narrative authorial voice” (129). Whereas Fielding’s Mrs. Teachum explicitly corrected thinking and behavior, and while Wollstonecraft encouraged...